Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The general lack of usefulness of careers guidance teachers has come up a lot in conversation recently. I know that the one we had in school was, while well-meaning, absolutely no use - it should, for instance, have been perfectly clear to anyone who looked at my academic record that I was more suited to arts than science, but she went along with the standard view of “intelligent boys should do science”. Although, being honest, she was a nun, and had other priorities; the number of guys in my class who reported that they’d been told she believed they had a vocation was impressive.

But thinking about it, what the hell can they do? How do you determine what a 16 year old might be good at, when a sizeable fraction of the jobs potentially available at 22 don’t exist yet? “Game testing” is now a perfectly valid career path - I know three or four game testers - but anyone proposing that in the early 90s to a careers guidance teacher would have got a blank look, and from the better ones, a gentle reminder of reality.

The job I’m doing now did not exist at all when I was 16, and barely existed by the time I was 19. I’ve been around for the invention of it, essentially. Most of my friends work in jobs that similarly did not exist. Careers guidance teachers did not know terms like “systems administration” in the 90s, “computer programmer” was barely on the horizon in their terms.

And it’s not just my techie friends, either. I can see a guy right now through the office window who’s cleaning the stonework with a very high-tech looking steam gun. He looks like he’s enjoying his work. Given that he’s driving a very shiny black SUV, with a registration plate from this year, I’m thinking he’s doing pretty well too. But I’ll bet his careers guidance teacher did not say “steam-cleaning stonework for corporate buildings, son, it’s a licence to print money”.

Go back another ten years, and the default assumption was that most of us would do the same jobs as our parents. I went to school with kids who lived on farms that their families had owned and worked on for four generations. The concept that any of them might not be farmers was both alien and unwelcome. There were a few non-farming families; instead, they’d been shopkeepers, steel cutters, or carpenters for similar lengths of time.

So, given that by the time the kids currently coming out of 2nd level education get into employment, the jobs they are doing will be things like “search refinement engineer” or “nanotechnology compensator”, or “bioinformatics controller”, or whatever, how can careers guidance counsellors possibly do anything useful? No wonder they’re all bitter.

And yet you can’t just get rid of them - kids need some guidance about college courses, or they’ll end up opting for an easy course in whatever college their best friend is going to. So… how do you offer careers guidance these days?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with various people, and I figured I’d get it written down. I don’t like podcasts. This is not because I have some concealed Luddite tendencies, nor because I’m looking for something popular to dislike and be controversial over.

Putting it simply, podcasts are slow, irritating, and inconvenient - a step backward from the efficiency of text. No, I don’t like radio either.

Slow: I can read way faster than anyone can talk. I can read the transcript of a podcast in less than a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it, and that assumes the speakers aren’t stopping to hem, haw and um their way through a conversation. My time is valuable to me - give me the transcript.

Irritating: With at least one podcast I listened to a while back - and this was a twenty-something Irish male - if you removed the word “like” from the stream, it would have been about half as long. Other accents can be difficult to understand, or just plain unpleasant, and people who are perfectly well able to express themselves in text end up incomprehensible in speech. Sound quality isn’t always what it might be, and having to listen very carefully to make out what someone is saying is, well, an irritation.

Inconvenient: First, I have to get the podcasts onto some piece of equipment where I can hear them. Since listening to voice takes a huge amount of my attention, I can’t do that in work, and I usually have better things to do at home, so it has to be something portable. I have a small MP3 player, but the rigmarole of downloading the file and transferring it to the player and so on is tiresome. Then, unless I actually am concentrating all the time, I miss bits. I can’t just look back up the page; I have to rewind a bit, and hope I got the right spot. Neither can I easily flick forward through the bits I’m not interested in. “45 minutes in” is no use unless I can see a timer, and my MP3 player doesn’t have one. For that matter, finding 45 minutes in on Winamp involves messing with a slider.

So, in essence: give me writing, dammit. Sound is for conversation and music.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So we’re just back from a week in Finland. Most of it we spent at Nina’s homeplace, or at her grandmother’s house, but we were in the towns (cities?) of Lahti and Tampere for a few hours each. I’ve not been in Tampere before, and I had a completely different impression of Lahti this time round, so I wanted to write a bit about each of them.

Lahti is more of an infrastructure hub than anything else, so there’s no university there (although there’s a college), nor any port or notable natural features. So it’s generally regarded as being a bit grey and dull. I’ve only been there in summer once (possibly twice) before, so my impressions of it have usually been in the depths of winter, and haven’t been all that positive. This time, though - and I’m waiting for the Finns reading this to give me some funny looks - I was very impressed.

Partly with the shops, which had an impressively wide range of magazines and books in English, and a hell of a lot of music I like, at more than reasonable prices. The Free Records shop had a pile of melodic metal at under ten euros an album, and pretty much everything Iron Maiden ever released. There was also a branch of a craft-and-small-furnishings chain, Tiimari, which had a stunning range of papercrafting goods, paint, picture frames, boxes, and stationery - such that I had to pull myself out before I bought the whole shop.

And then there were the non-mainstream kids. Any other time I’ve been in Lahti, it’s seemed to be a very mainstream city, with most of the kids (or people in their twenties, Finns all look young to me) wearing fairly ordinary clothes - or in the case of the usually rather grouchy looking eighteen-year-olds, military service fatigues. This time, the first thing I saw getting out of the car was a bunch of skater types on a corner, and I saw a wider variety of goths and punk types than I’ve seen in one place in years. I know that goth, rock and metal music are closer to the mainstream in Finland than in Ireland and the UK, but I’ve not seen anything quite like this before. Even in the department stores, there were people wandering around in clothes that I’d have considered killing for ten years ago, and one girl in a bookshop was wearing thigh-high boots with more buckles than I could count. The one guy I saw in military kit was carrying about six huge shopping bags for his girlfriend, and was putting on a brave smile every time she looked at him. So I got a much more positive impression of Lahti than I ever have before.

Tampere got itself off to a good start when we flew into it, since the airport there is a small regional one. It’s small, pleasant, and has no messing around or extra procedures. The town itself is a university town, and that’s evident in the range of shops as well as the bars and cafes. There was one cafe - Café Europa - which was done out in an antique style, with old furniture, pictures and books, and a pile of boardgames behind the counter, which made me want to take the whole place home. And the local games shop - a branch of Fantasiapelit, which I’m familiar with in Helsinki, had friendly staff, a gaming table in full swing, and a range of goods I’ve only seen exceeded by, well, the Helsinki branch. They even had a copy of Burning Wheel on the shelf, though they don’t any more, since it’s here beside me. For future investigation, there’s a Viking restaurant, and a decent-looking sushi place as well.

So, yeah, rather impressed with both towns, and inclined to wonder again why Irish regional towns are such awful places in comparison.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So we were having some trouble in the new residence with the plumbing. Namely, the toilet was backing up. This isn’t pleasant. We had a plumber, who’s a friend of the landlord’s, and familiar with the pipes, come out and look at it. He expected it to be a pretty simple job, since it had happened before, and was a fairly quick fix. So he scooted out into the back yard, pulled up a cover, and attacked the outlets of the junction there with a plunger. Nothing moving.

More tools, he said, and came back the following evening with same. He attacked it with such vigour that the tools (plumbing rods, with a plunger on the end, for those familiar) got stuck. Badly stuck, as in, he had to call a burly relative to come and help him extract it (I was stuck in work). He scratched his head a bit - as did I when I got back in the evening - and we tried to figure out what the hell could be wrong with it. Some water had come up through floor tiles in an unexpected part of the premises, so we figured that would be a good place to start the next time. Armed with that, and information from the landlord that there was a manhole cover in an alleyway behind the garden wall, we went at it on Saturday morning.

I met more neighbours in one morning there than I did in four years in Hollybank. We went in and out of alleys, people’s backyards, over walls, peering down into manholes and shores and vents, and learned more about the plumbing of Portobello than anyone should ever know. Nothing moving.

We pulled up the tiles where the water had come up, and some more tiles hidden under them, and some cracked tiles under that, and arrived at an unknown and buried vent. We plunged that and checked the outflow from various drainage systems, and tried to figure out what the hell was happening. There was clearly a connection between the cover at the back and this newly-excavated vent, because if you plunged the back yard one, the other bubbled and spat - but not vice versa. Water run into the new vent drained without trouble, and every single waste pipe in the place, except the toilet, was fine - but there was equally clearly no problem between the toilet and the underground plumbing.
On the verge of giving up, and muttering vengefully about Dynorod, compressors, and advanced spelunking, we wandered outside to poke once more at the original suspected source of the problem. One touch of the plunger, and suddenly, it began to flow, and was clear within seconds. Triumph!
It was aliens, mysterious Victorian sewage valves, or a masochistic plumbing system which just wanted to be beaten for a while. You choose.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The new office, now that it has blinds and we can take down the cardboard radiation shields we needed (the southwest-ish curving wall is all glass) is getting better. There’s still a lot of white and steel around, though, leaving it looking very cold. We’re considering getting some plants in.

My immediate reaction is to look for a bonsai tree, but they’re hard to take care of. Anyone got any recommendations for something pleasantly leafy, which requires very little care, and won’t trigger allergies? We’ve a lemon geranium at home I could snag some cuttings from, but I know it’s a common allergy plant.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve started writing up the account of the India trip. The first day’s worth is now available for your reading pleasure, transcribed from my travelling journal. Illustrations will follow later.

India!

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Operation Move completed successfully while I was away, and the new office seems to be entirely bearable. We’re in Harmony Court, on Harmony Row, which is about three blocks east of Pearse Street Station. Therefore, if any of you fine people are available for purposes of lunching (I believe I can meet employees of the Great AI somewhere halfway) in the area, do let me know. Within sane parameters, I can decide myself when lunch should occur, although appointments later than 13:30 are likely to include me staring silently and hungrily at you until food arrives. Usual contact methods apply - or since I have a very fine window seat, you could just stand outside and wave.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It’s 11:00 on a Monday morning, and I’m on the first actual day off of three weeks holidays. Tomorrow, at an hour so early it might as well be today, we’re flying via Schipol to India. This is the first break from work this year that’s more than two days, it’s the first time I’ve left the country in almost two years, and it’s the first time ever going to a place where I won’t necessarily recognise or understand anything. I’m really looking forward to it.

The last one might take some explanation - everywhere else I have ever been, there are some things I recognise. Trees, for instance, are not appreciably different in Finland, in the US, in France or Spain or Greece. Sure, there’s more cypress in Greece and less ash, but I still know what they are. I don’t expect to recognise any trees in India. Likewise, in all those places, a few brands carry across. In India, there’ll be stretches of time where even the omnipresent Coca-cola logo might not be seen for days. It might as well be another planet, and about the only things that will be the same will be the stars. It’s going to be great.

I’m reasonably confident of dealing with the temperatures. We’re looking at daytime temperatures of just under 40°C, and night temperatures hovering around 20°C. That’s a pretty huge drop, and I suspect the 20° might feel quite cold, relatively speaking.

We’ve a few days in Delhi before the tour proper starts, and the plan is to spend those days acclimatising, exploring Delhi, eating, and probably buying clothes, and music and books by the ton to post back. I gather from various sources that Delhi is a second-hand book paradise. We have two rucksacks, neither of which is currently more than half-full, so between what we can carry and what we can post back, we should rival a small import business. I intend to get a few nice statues of Ganesha as well - the little brass one that sits on my desk in work has done me nothing but good - and I suspect that a few more statues and devotional objects will find their way in as well.
The time difference is currently only four and a half hours - it should be about eight, but India has its own unique time zone. That’s going to do odd things to the sunrise and sunset times, but my maths - always prone to hiding when timezones come up - flees entirely when I try to work out what’s going to happen early or late.

We have both a digital and analogue camera with us. I can more or less work both of them, but I suspect Nina will be photographer-in-chief, as they cooperate far better with her. Expect very few pictures of us, and lots of scenery, buildings, and markets.

And there’s the food. Some of the guide books say not to buy from roadside stalls at all, only ever drink bottled water, and preferably bring all your food with you in non-perishable tablet form. I intend, within the bounds of common sense, to ignore all that. I like the Indian food we get here, and I’m damned if I’m going to travel eight thousand miles and not sample the food properly. Which means roadside stalls, markets, shops, restaurants, and whatever else comes my way.

I’ll be putting together a website when we get back, and we’ll be keeping journals while we’re away, so you’ll get as much detail as you ever wanted, and possibly more.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

On a gloomy Monday morning, it is a very good thing to have had a good weekend. And I had an excellent (birthday) weekend. HIghlights follow.
Very shortly after I woke up, Nina had placed two parcels and a card on the bed. One of the parcels was huge. Very careful unwrapping revealed Jimmy Doherty’s A Taste of the Country, a cookery book I’ve been eyeing for quite some time now, and… a lightbox. A lightbox is a timber frame with an opaque plastic pane on top, through which light from two bulbs underneath shines. It’s for tracing on thick paper. I have wanted one for ever for my mapmaking, and now I have one. It is the best thing ever, and I’ve already discovered a number of insanely clever things you can do when you can trace from one level to the next of a map. I intend to discover many, many more.
Then breakfast. Breakfast was the biggest fry in the world, cooked by Nina - bacon, egg, sausages, white & black pudding, mushrooms, beans, potato waffles, hash browns, toast, tomatoes - with apple juice and coffee. It was nothing short of superb.
Then, when I could contemplate food again, chocolate fudge cake and coffee.
I played MMOs pretty much non-stop all day, and then we went out to the pub with Dave, Glen and Bríd, for a very good evening out. Thence to Glen’s house, and eventually left there at after two in the morning, after intake of both whiskey and rum.
And then yesterday had the added bonus of the fish-and-chip dinner I wasn’t able to get in the pub the night before, and Niall dropping over to lend me his new copy of Ptolus.
It was an absolutely excellent birthday, and Nina is very much thanked for it.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I finished one book at lunch, and didn’t have another to start. I poked through a few of the charity- and second-hand bookshops in Dun Laoghaire, and found: The D&D Red Box. I am a happy geek this afternoon.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So, watched Doctor Who. Wrote a brief commentary. Not really impressed, and concluding that Russell Davies’ writing is rather juvenile.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The annual barbecue goes into full swing on Saturday. In advance of this, we could do with a few folks on Friday evening to move furniture, help put up rain covers and lights, and generally get the place in order. Any volunteers?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

My plans to spend today doing more gardening have been foiled by heavy thundery rain. Junior Cat ran out to dance in it as soon as he heard the thunder; Senior Cat is sulky and bad tempered - I think she was planning on another day’s basking. Ah well. Indoor stuff for the morning, and some fetching of barbecue equipment in the afternoon.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It is a glorious day out there. I stepped outside when I was letting the cats out, and watched Junior Cat sprint across the garden and hop in the pond - no, I don’t know why, he seemed as surprised as me. However his sprint was slowed a bit by the jungle in his way, hitherto known as a lawn. I know it doubled in depth during the week, because last weekend, I could see Senior Cat when she was lying down in it. This morning, it was hard to see her when she was standing up. So out with the lawnmower… oh good gods, what the the hell’s happened here?

The alleyway beside the kitchen extension was completely blocked by honeysuckle. Now, this “alley” is a good eight feet wide, and holds a shed, with room to open the door. While the honeysuckle grows like wildfire at the best of times, that was ridiculous. So I forced my way through, and found that in last night’s wind, the trellis that it started out climbing on and and has since mostly eaten, had parted from the wall. At least I think it was the wind, it could have been sheet weight of honeysuckle. Two stout planks from the shed helped to force it back to the wall, and then I realised that the composter was still completely invisible. I poked through the honeysuckle until I heard a thump, and then did some digging. And then went and got the shears. I had to literally carve a short tunnel through the stuff to reach the composter, and open actual warfare to clear enough space to open the top. And since I last put stuff in it about three days ago, I can only guess that the slide forward off the wall covered the bin, and the planks didn’t push it back off that bit, or Jeff Noon has been having a word with it.

I’d already spent about half an hour just on this, but I at least I could then get out the lawnmower.  It’s a manual push-it-and-it-cuts type. Whirr, whirr, chunk. Clean mower blades. Whirr, whirr, chunk. Repeat. I eventually worked out that clearing one area and mowing toward that would work better, as opposed to the more intuitive clear an area and mow from it technique.

So now there’s a scent of fresh-cut grass, enlivened by the added scents of fresh-cut dock, nettle, and rosemary (not at all a bad combination, mind) from where I had to trim back some stuff around the edges. I’d forgotten the nettles were there; I had a notion earlier in the year of eating them, but they’re gone way too stringy now. There’s still a lot of trimming to do, but I’m going to have to wait until the evening for that, as it’s now baking hot out there.

In a repeat demonstration of feline insanity (or maybe he’s just too hot), Junior Cat proceeded to dance in the sprayed water from the hose as I attended to strawberries and rocket. He went to demonstrate his new damp self to Senior Cat and got boxed in the ears for his troubles.

The rocket has come up gloriously, and is now starting to go to seed, so it’s time to harvest and replant - actually, does anyone know if I can get the seeds from the old plants and plant them? The ground-planted herbs, on the other hand, were a complete failure - I saw three small dill plants, which later vanished, and nothing else came up. The strawberries, both alpines from Freecycle and a larger unnamed breed bought in from a florist, are all doing very well - we should have the first alpines by midweek, I think, and bigger ones by next weekend. If anyone knows of somewhere I can reach by bus that is still selling strawberry plants, I could do with about a dozen to fill up the top of the planter.

And now I’m at the machine, beside a very open sash window, with the cats going in and out through it, and sunshine blazing in around me, with much-needed coffee. I’m going to have to venture out of the house soon to get bread and milk, but otherwise it’s an afternoon for complete relaxation.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

If it doesn’t get cooler tonight than it did last night, I’m going to have to consider sleeping in the garden.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a pile of stuff sitting around on my hard drive that could be on the web. It’d be useful for backup, aside from anything else. There’s stuff from my various D&D campaigns (not the DM notes, but background and handouts), short essays on various topics, photographs and other odds and ends of data. I’ve a few notions for things I want to write in php as well. dukestreet.org isn’t really suitable for this stuff - I want to keep it as it is, for the most part.

So I need a domain of my own for… stuff. Tempting and all as drewstuff.com is, I’m sure I can do better. Have you suggestions?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I created a bebo.com account this afternoon, more for curiousity than interest - gothwalk.bebo.com, if anyone’s interested - it’s a livejournal/myspace clone, pretty much. I was amused to find that there was a community on it for alumni of my secondary school, and stunned by the number of people in it. And then I started looking for people I know, and while I found a few, I’m seeing a definite pattern by graduation years. From 1995, three people. From 1996, two. 1997, five. 1998, twelve. 1999, seventeen. And then it explodes; from 2000 on, there’re more than forty per year. I’m guessing that’s when the internet took off in rural Ireland, then…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m starting to kick my political blog, A Political Education, back into motion in a slightly different mode, because I’m tried of coming across stuff that I’d like to post there, and not doing so becuase it’s not in the topics I’m working on. So I’m going to keep working on the research topics, but post on other things as well, and hopefully not make too many mistakes in the process. I’m sure people will correct me if I do.

It’s on LJ as politicaledu, and you can get the raw feed here: A Political Education Atom Feed

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

For the last week or ten days, someone has been searching - nearly every day - for “andrew shiel fcj”, and landing on this page on dukestreet.org. They look at one or two pages, and then go away again. I can’t imagine that it’s a series of different people - it’s too concentrated in time for that. It’s possible, I suppose, that it’s someone who isn’t computer-literate enough to know how to use bookmarks, or to memorise the URL - but if they have access to a computer every day, that seems odd in and of itself. I cannot work out who they might be, nor why they might be repeatedly searching for me, yet not making any contact when they find the page.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I brought the copy of Oblivion we got back to HMV yesterday, since it doesn’t run on a machine that’s well above the minimum spec. I was prepared to quote the Consumer Rights Board, and the Sale of Goods Act 1990, and so on and so forth. I was rather surprised to have the people behind the counter go, “Yeah, that’s cool. Put your name and address here, and here’s your money back.” - with no hassle at all. And they were very nice about it. Impressed.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Last night was an excellent night out - some of the guys in one of the World of Warcraft guilds we play with came over from the UK, and we pubbed and ate in a fantastic Chinese in Little Mary Street, and went on to Fibbers.

Today we broke out the barbecue, because it was nice and sunny, and cooked outside. It got chilly afterward, but the food worked well. I don’t know why gammon steaks are not more popular - they’re like giant rashers, and they’re really good when grilled. And being able to cook with herbs that I picked and dried last year was also excellent - rosemary, in this case.

I’ve planted some more herbs this year - last year’s vegetables sort-of worked, but weren’t really suitable. I now have rocket coming up rather quickly, and also parsely, dill, and thyme (at least I think it was thyme - I’m not 100% sure now). There’ll be more rocket going in soon, as I don’t expect the current crop to survive long - it’s one of the few leaf vegetables I can’t get enough of.

I’d like to try basil as well, and I have the seeds for it, but it’s a more difficult beast to grow than the rest - needs planting indoors, and then putting out, which I’m not really all that well set up for. I have a vague notion of hanging seed trays in the kitchen window, where they’d get a bit of light and still be out of feline reach. I’m not sure it’s very practical, though.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

You know things have moved on a bit when you listen to Rage Against The Machine and think “Y’know, this is pretty mellow.”

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I do wonder what happened to the negative parts of the various seasonal traditions - the kids who didn’t get Christmas presents because they weren’t good (or got coal, or sticks, or whatever), the ones who didn’t find Easter eggs, and so on. They seem to have vanished entirely.

I was reminded of this by an overheard conversation in a supermarket today wherein two (well-dressed, well-spoken, polite) kids were discussing blackmail tactics to get the maximum possible number of Easter eggs out of their relatives. The small boy was good on the numbers, but weak on motivation (his concept of beating up his older brother seemed doomed to failure, for instance), and the small girl had them down a lot better, having already concealed pictures of “Mary and George” in safe places for a later exchange against a chocolate currency.